Virtual machines and virtual ports are commonly used in the storage/networking environment. The increasing use of virtual machine partitions within servers demand an increase in the number of available virtual port identifiers (N_Port IDs (NPIVs)) on a switch port. Typical NPIV implementation has a limit of 127 or 255 virtual addresses per physical port. This limitation is undesirable because virtual machines may demand more virtual ports. Continuous efforts are being made to increase the number of ports.